20080119

Come the Iron Night

by Robert Clay

It tumbles through the void in a great meandering cartwheel, end over end, back and forth like the pendulum of hell. A cold, dark, iron lump, leftover from some long forgotten cataclysmic creation event. It follows a path carved into space-time by the laws of physics, never ending, indisputable. It has done so since the beginning of local time, or as local as you can be in the vastness of space. But it is going somewhere, no doubt about that, a small blue planet lies dead-ahead, or as dead-ahead as you can be on an elliptical destiny. It even has a name, Army, but don’t smile just yet: Army is short for Armageddon.